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Introduction 1 Constructing the Suburbs

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Introduction 1 Constructing the Suburbs Notes Introduction 1 . See also Damon’s interest in “poetry deemed aesthetically lacking or poetry that embraces a messy or unfinished aesthetic” (Postliterary 4–5). 2 . Alan Read’s edited collection Architecturally Speaking: Practices of Art, Architecture and the Everyday provide a useful overview of current debates: “For some time, the publishing of late modernism has been underpinned by geographical inquiry, while history has been superseded. Space, not time, has become the privileged domain. This volume recognizes this shift towards the spatial yet is critical of the valorization of space at the expense of the critical relations between temporality, built form and the performative dynamics of architecture within everyday life” (1). 3 . Lefebvre illustrates his point with reference to the so-called Kitchen Debates of 1959 wherein Nixon and Khruschchev famously debated the pros and cons of the American versus Soviet way of life (Lefebvre 8–9, 45). He commends the work of American writers who have “been able to open their eyes to what is nearest to them—everyday life—and to find themes in it which amaze us by their violence and originality” (235). 1 Constructing the Suburbs 1 . See Hayden, Building ; Kelly; Gowans; Martinson; and Stilgoe for comprehen- sive accounts of suburban growth across the nineteenth century. 2 . In place of heavy oak frames with complex carpentered joints, the “Balloon Frame,” first used in Chicago in the early 1830s, needed only a framework of two-by-four posts joined by platform board floors, which helped to spread the structural stresses and thus ensure the integrity of the whole. See K. Jackson 125–7. 3 . The increasing use of horse-drawn carts and streetcars from the mid-nineteenth century resulted in the daily depositing onto the streets of tons of manure. Jackson cites Joel Tarr’s calculation that in 1907, Milwaukee’s 12,500 horses might deposit up to 130 tons of manure per day (Jackson, Crabgrass 107). 184 ● Notes 4 . For a critique of the rhetoric of separate spheres, see C. Davidson; Kerber; McHugh, and G. Matthews. 5 . Automobile ownership also engendered novel forms of suburban development such as the “garage suburbs” that were prevalent around Detroit and Los Angeles in the 1920s. Settlers purchased land and then, when money allowed, erected a garage in which the family would reside while they took piecemeal paid work and began constructing their own more substantial homes. See Gowans 20; Nicolaides 12, 32. 6 . Russell Lynes of Harper’s wrote to McGinley in Feb. 1950 pitching an idea for an article: “There is good fun to be had in a piece on the servant problem these days, with special reference to the many families who are employing displaced persons (DPs) as a means of giving them a foothold in this country, at the same time that they cope with their domestic problems. This seems to be more of a suburban problem than an urban one. One of our editors tells us that the cor- respondence on this subject in the Scarsdale Inquirer is very good fun.” 7 . On de-centering as a consequence of the lessons learned during the war in Europe, see Stilgoe 301. For more on nuclear preparedness and civil defense see D. Nelson; Paul Williams; and Allan M. Winkler. 8 . See K. Jackson 164ff for a history of road-construction materials. 9 . Others included the Long Island Motor Parkway (1906–11); the Bronx River Parkway (1906–1923) and, in California, the “Arroyo Seco Parkway” (later the Passadena Parkway; conceived in 1911 but not completed until 1940) (K. Jackson 166–7). 10 . The Merritt Parkway is only so named as it nears the Connecticut boundary; the section that goes through Scarsdale is the Hutchinson River Parkway. 1 1 . I n The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers , Paul Kennedy observes that “‘Rome fell; Babylon fell Scarsdale’s turn will come’” (qtd. in Lawson-Peebles 33). 12 . The lessons of wartime manufacturing processes, such as the use of economies of scale and mass-production techniques, were also instrumental to the emer- gence of the postwar suburbs (Miller and Nowak 44ff; Brennan; Phillips). It was in this context that Bill Levitt learned his trade; his company had held wartime contracts to supply the US military with semi-prefabricated housing for workers and had seen the commercial sense of dividing construction into multiple uniform and replicable stages, assembled by crews of noncraft, non- union laborers (“Up from the Potato Fields”). 1 3 . S e e P a c k a r d , The Waste Makers for an account of some of the potential costs of such acquisitiveness. A. R. Ammons’ Garbage (1993) explores similar ter- ritory. Costello reads Garbage as a “response to the awesome landscape of our discarded forms, and nature’s own expenditure and waste” (17). 14 . In fact, many women confounded the stereotype of suburban femininity by resuming paid employment outside the home, albeit usually at an inferior level. See Hayden, Building 147; Coontz 16; Miller and Nowak 162; Faludi 74. 1 5 . S e e J u r c a , White Diaspora for an extended reading of male self-pity in the fic- tion of the period. Notes ● 185 16 . Levitt installed Bendix washing machines, GE stoves and refrigerators, and Admiral Televisions as standard (Baxandall and Ewen 136). Levittown’s ordi- nances prohibited hanging washing out to dry during the evenings or at week- ends, that is, when men would be in residence. 1 7 . S e e a l s o U p d i k e ’ s p o e m “ W a s h ” (Telephone Poles 44) and Wilbur’s “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” (New and Collected 233). The “Mixmaster” also appears in a number of poems including Louis Simpson’s “Things” (Selected 135) and Josephine Miles’s “Ride” (Collected 92). 18 . See Dines for a reading of discourses of heteronormativity in contemporary suburban fiction. 19 . Class was another important variable. Black periodicals such as Ebony deployed the same rhetoric and marketing strategies as did white periodicals in their attempt to sell to their readers the suburban dream (Wiese 99–119). See also Pattillo-McCoy. 20 . As Wini Breines notes, black workers were present in the postwar suburbs as servants, nursemaids, gardeners, chauffeurs, and in other service jobs (49ff). See also Jurca, White 178 n. 21 and Gans, Levittowners 374. 21 . Baldassare reiterates the point: “Suburban growth was driven by an ‘invasion and succession’ process in older, inner city neighborhoods. City areas became the destination points for recent, poor, immigrant workers . As a result of the ‘invasion,’ many of the long-term residents of these inner city areas moved to suburban areas further away from the central business district” (479–80, 482). 22 . See O’Donnell for a useful reading of the “Suburban Eden” of Los Angeles. 23 . The threat of violence met the first black residents of Levittown, Pennsylvania in 1958. For a first-person account of this incident, see Daisy D. Myers, “Reflections on Levittown.” 2 Suburban Tastes 1 . Harry Henderson notes of his Levittown and Park Forest interviewees: “Within the group, pressure to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ is felt most strongly . Many told me that they didn’t want to ‘get ahead, but we want to keep up with the others; we are all young and starting together and we don’t want to fall behind’” (“Rugged” 80). Coontz suggests that because white-collar wages at this time were accelerating more slowly than those of blue-collar workers, some middle- class housewives entered paid employment “not so much to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ as to stay ahead of the O’Malleys” (162). 2 . Denney has a poem “Since the Donkey-Tail Barometer: An Essay on American Weather-or-Noes” in the Chicago Review (Fall 1955). It draws on conventional images of suburbia (picture windows, parkways, elm trees, televisions) to sug- gest a distinction between authentic and synthetic experience of weather. 3 . For James Gilbert, “the dispute over mass culture in the 1950s . was a struggle in which the participants were arguing over power—over who had the right and 186 ● Notes responsibility to shape American culture” (7). See John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses for a sustained account of the relationship between the two, albeit primarily in an English context. 4 . See Lazere for an overview of the original Partisan Review debates and a fiftieth anniversary symposium on the same theme. For a useful summary of the con- text, see also Halliwell. 5 . The decision to select two editors with such divergent views was an intentional one and reflects the disparity of contemporary opinions on these issues. 6 . Abbott notes a similar schism in modernist poetry publishing between, for example, Transition ’s motto “The plain reader be damned” and Poetry ’s “To have great poets there must be great audiences too” (218–9). 7 . From its inception in the late nineteenth century, the Saturday Evening Post aimed to be “the medium of an American consciousness . it was designed to reach audiences ignored by ‘highbrow’ magazines like Harper’s and the Atlantic ” (Cohn 9). With its sister periodical, the Ladies’ Home Journal (founded in 1883), it “exemplified and conveyed to [its] readers a powerful and mutually reinforc- ing mix of gender and commerce that had come to characterize a significant segment of American popular culture by the turn of the century” (Damon- Moore 2). See Harrington, Poetry 31–49; Newcomb, “Out” 248ff; and Nye 119–22 for an account of poetry’s circulation in magazines and newspapers in the late nineteenth-century and interwar years.
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